Matrix Podcast

California is one of the wealthiest states in the country, yet it also faces persistent poverty, stark economic inequality, and some of the highest costs of living in the nation. These tensions raise fundamental questions about who benefits from California's economic growth and why so many residents struggle to achieve economic security.
Recorded on October 7, 2026, this panel brought together leading scholars to examine the forces shaping wealth and poverty across the state. Drawing on research spanning inequality, affordability, economic mobility, and social policy, the discussion explored the roots of California's economic divides, how they are reproduced across generations, and what is at stake for families, communities, and the future of the state.
The panel featured David Grusky, Edward Ames Edmonds Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, and Professor of Sociology at Stanford, and Samuel Trachtman, Senior Researcher at the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative at UC Berkeley. Evan White, Executive Director of the California Policy Lab at UC Berkeley, moderated.
The Social Science Matrix California Spotlight series focuses on important issues that are directly relevant to the people of California, in support of the University of California's mission as a public research institution.
This event was co-sponsored by the Goldman School of Public Policy, the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative, and the Opportunity Lab.
A transcript of this recording is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/wealth-and-poverty.

Recorded on October 1, 2026, this video features an Authors Meet Critics panel on the book Demos: How the People Ruled Athens, by Daniela Cammack, Assistant Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, with a courtesy appointment in the Department of Ancient Greek and Roman Studies (formerly Classics).
Professor Cammack was joined in conversation by James Porter, Distinguished Professor and Irving Stone Chair in Literature in the Department of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley, and Kinch Hoekstra, Chancellor's Professor of Political Science and Law at UC Berkeley. Dylan Riley, Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley, moderated.
This event was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies and the Departments of Political Science and Ancient Greek & Roman Studies.
The Social Science Matrix Authors Meet Critics book series features lively discussions about recently published books authored by social scientists at UC Berkeley. For each event, the author discusses the key arguments of their book with fellow scholars.
A transcript of this podcast is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/demos.
About the Book
In ancient Greece, demokratia meant "rule by the people"—but what people, and how did they rule? Scholars have long argued that demokratia signified the rule of all adult male citizens over themselves. In Demos, Daniela Cammack counters this view by arguing that demokratia meant rule by the crowd that assembled when a public meeting was held. This crowd was the demos, which the Greeks distinguished from orators, generals, councilors, public benefactors, and other civic leaders.
Drawing on literary and epigraphical evidence as well as the key theoretical insights of Aristotle and Hobbes, Cammack explains how constantly changing masses of ordinary ancient Greek men ruled while their leaders were ruled over. This political system relied on kratos, the power to prevail militarily, epitomized by the victories of the Athenian demos in civil conflicts around 508 and 404 BC. In peacetime, the superior strength of the demos revealed itself in large, frequently summoned crowds of ordinary citizens acting as policymakers, legislators, and (crucially) judges, who wielded great power over politicians.
Aristotle characterized the years 403 to 322 as the era of "ultimate democracy," and it was during this period that the Athenians pulled off a feat unmatched by modern democrats: making use of talented and ambitious leaders without being ruled by them. By contrast, the Greeks called rule by elected office-holders "oligarchy." As people today lose faith in democratic institutions, Cammack's account prompts us to ask if we've been doing democracy all wrong—or even at all.

Recorded on September 9, 2026 at the University of California, Berkeley, this Authors Meet Critics panel centered on the book Normalizing Inequality: How Californians Make Sense of the Growing Divide, by G. Cristina Mora, Professor of Sociology, and Tianna Paschel, Associate Professor of African American Studies.
Professors Mora and Paschel were joined in conversation by UC Berkeley scholars Lisa García Bedolla, Vice Provost for Graduate Studies and Hitchcock Dean of the Graduate Division and Chancellor's Professor of Education, and Desmond Jagmohan, Assistant Professor of Political Science. Nicholas Vargas, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, moderated.
The panel was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, the School of Education, the Othering and Belonging Institute, and the Departments of Political Science and African American Studies.
The Social Science Matrix Authors Meet Critics book series features lively discussions about recently published books authored by social scientists at UC Berkeley. For each event, the author discusses the key arguments of their book with fellow scholars.
About the Book
California has long been mythologized as the quintessential land of opportunity and reinvention — a place where anyone, regardless of origin, can forge a new life and realize their aspirations. Yet beneath this gilded narrative lies a starker reality: California ranks among the most unequal states in one of the world's most unequal countries, where the middle class finds itself increasingly squeezed. Economic inequality is not an anomaly but part of a broader global phenomenon, as disparities deepen across the world. While we know a lot about its contours, its evolution over time and its intersections with race and immigration, we understand far less about how ordinary people interpret and internalize it.
In Normalizing Inequality, sociologists G. Cristina Mora and Tianna S. Paschel illuminate how middle-class Californians perceive and come to accept the inequalities that surround them. Drawing on extensive interviews and surveys, Mora and Paschel uncover a profound paradox at the heart of middle-class consciousness. They find that Californians are keenly aware of the systemic causes of inequality—they recognize policies engineered to benefit the wealthy, they acknowledge how structural racism makes it hard for some groups to get ahead—yet they consistently minimize these forces. Instead, they gravitate toward explanations rooted in individualism, moral character, and the idea that things are worse in other places. Racism and racial inequality in California become palatable when framed as "not as bad as the South." Immigrant exploitation, however severe, transforms into evidence of the American Dream fulfilled simply upon arrival. Economic pressures that displace others become surmountable through personal industriousness and forbearance.
These beliefs about inequality grow more troubling still. Middle-class Californians sometimes blame disempowered people for their circumstances—acknowledging structural barriers facing homeless and undocumented populations while simultaneously faulting them for insufficient drive or criminal behavior that compounds their difficulties. When contemplating California's future, interviewees envision economic prosperity propelled by technological innovation, yet remain curiously unconcerned with how present inequalities might shape that tomorrow. Their imagined future is one where White and Asian American populations thrive, while Black, Latino, and economically marginalized Californians either vanish through displacement or fade into irrelevance. As respondents use these interpretive frameworks to make sense of inequality, they lean heavily on California's foundational narratives of opportunity, sanctuary and multiracial promise. Normalizing Inequality offers an incisive examination of how ordinary citizens make sense of inequality and, through that very process of sense-making, how they tolerate and passively reproduce the conditions they often claim to deplore.
A transcript of this podcast is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/normalizing-inequality.

Recorded on May 5, 2026, this video features a talk by Benjamin Recht, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley, focused on his book, The Irrational Decision: How We Gave Computers the Power to Choose for Us. Professor Recht was joined in conversation by Marion Fourcade, Professor of Sociology and Director of Social Science Matrix. 
This event was co-sponsored by the D-Lab; the Algorithmic Fairness and Opacity Group (AFOG); the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society (CSTMS); and the UC Berkeley Departments of Sociology and Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences.
About the Book
Mathematicians and engineers of the 1940s set out to design machines that could act as ideal rational agents in the face of uncertainty. In this pursuit, a cluster of foundational mathematical technologies — including information theory, linear programming, game theory, and neural networks — emerged as a foundation for a mathematical formalization of rationality, reshaping how we think about human decision-making itself. The Irrational Decision traces how a narrow mathematical framework for computing came to define rationality in economics, public policy, and popular culture. Recht's talk will discuss how these seminal computational methods have evolved into a robust discipline and industry, with success stories in accelerating computers, regulating pharmaceuticals, and deploying electronic commerce. These examples will highlight how automated decision systems excel in specific sweet spots with clear rules, well-defined goals, and well-constrained contexts. They will also show how, outside these narrow contexts, the rational program tends to absurdity. Given these strengths and limitations, the discussion will explore how to best harness 80 years of unfathomable computational progress while preserving human agency and judgment.
About Benjamin Recht
Benjamin Recht is a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley. He is the recipient of a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the 2012 SIAM/MOS Lagrange Prize in Continuous Optimization, the 2014 Jamon Prize, the 2015 William O. Baker Award for Initiatives in Research, and the 2017 and 2020 NeurIPS Test of Time Awards. He is the author of three books: "Optimization for Modern Data Analysis" (2022), with Stephen J. Wright; "Patterns, Predictions, and Actions: Foundations of Machine Learning" (2022), with Moritz Hardt; and "The Irrational Decision: How We Gave Computers the Power to Choose for Us" (2026).
A full transcript of this recording is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/benjamin-recht-the-irrational-decision-how-we-gave-computers-the-power-to-choose-for-us/

Recorded on April 9, 2026, this Authors Meet Critics panel features the book Incommunicable: Toward Communicative Justice in Health and Medicine, by Charles Briggs, the Alan Dundes Distinguished Professor and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley, co-director and graduate advisor of the UCB-UCSF Joint PhD Program in Medical Anthropology, and co-director of the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine.
Professor Briggs was joined in conversation by Elinor Ochs, Distinguished Research Professor of Anthropology at UCLA, and Eric Snoey, Department of Emergency Medicine, Alameda Health System at Highland Hospital and Clinical Professor in Emergency Medicine at the UCSF School of Medicine. Armando Lara-Millán, Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, moderated.
The panel was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Anthropology, the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine, and the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society.
About the Book
In Incommunicable, Charles L. Briggs examines the long-standing presumptions that medical discourse translates easily across geographic, racial, and class boundaries. Bringing linguistic and medical anthropology into conversation with Black and decolonial theory, he theorizes the failure in health communication as incommunicability, which negatively affects all patients, doctors, and healthcare providers. Briggs draws on W. E. B. Du Bois and the work of three philosopher-physicians — John Locke, Frantz Fanon, and Georges Canguilhem — to show how cultural models of communication and health have historically racialized people of color as being incapable of communicating rationally and understanding biomedical concepts.
He outlines incommunicability through a study of COVID-19 discourse, in which health professionals defined the disease based on scientific medical knowledge in ways that reduced varieties of nonprofessional knowledge about COVID-19 to "misinformation" and "conspiracy theories." This dismissal of nonprofessional knowledge led to a failure of communication that eroded trust in medical expertise. Building on efforts by social movements and coalitions of health professionals and patients to craft more just and equitable futures, Briggs helps imagine health systems and healthcare discourses beyond the oppressive weight of communicability and the stigma of incommunicability.
A transcript of this recording is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/incommunicable.